I remember telling Fred about how I almost beat the shit out’ve some dude at my post office job and Fred wrote back suggesting I try to keep my cool. How Fred managed to keep his composure long enough at Goodstone to write this masterpiece I’ll never know. Such incompetence, immaturity, idleness, lifelessness, idiocity, on-th-job drunkeness & insanity as can be witnessed in a Breughal painting. This book is about the end of the Industrial Revolution as personified by the day-to-day workings of a bomber aircraft factory–it certainly documents the coming end of the United States’ long-held boast as #1 industrial nation of the world. One wonders if morale picked up at Goodstone during the “crisis” in the Persian Gulf–did this insane asylum begin to sing & dance for the rich boy’s money & oil war? This book is a knife stuck in the guts, and twisted. And somehow Fred has done it all without getting caught up in the mire of hatred & spite that most of his fellow workmates have lost themselves in. Our dear Whitman would bawl his eyes out if he read this book and found out what has happened to his beloved workers of America (though I imagine every late-20th century factory in the world is like this, except maybe Japan’s).
Not for the patriotic or squeamish. 180 poems machined from solid steel, cool sweat & the catastrophic humorous eye of Voss. One might consider taking the train after reading this. And every time they fire up those jets, 5 blocks from here at Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, I’m gonna run for cover.–Mark Weber
